Today we have a bit of a double update: the cinematic teaser we made for Unity’s “Neon Challenge, and after that we are going to talk about the game world in HADES 9: what is there to find on your voyages and some of the work I am doing designing the areas of interest for the game.

Pre-alpha cinematic teaserThe teaser you see below Dan and I made over the holidays. We didn’t want it to take away real development time from the game, and the Unity “Neon Challenge” was a good opportunity to gain some experience creating cinematics for the game. We hope you like it!(To clarify, this is not your character. This is just that is meant to represent the feeling and darkness of the HADES universe.)

In the ashes of the Milky way, Humanity is a luxury that mankind cannot afford. The universe as you knew it is gone. Empires are gone. Cultures gone. Worlds. In the wake of the Extinction, you lead your survivors. Your people need hope, but only Hades 9 remains.

Rediscovering the galaxy, and it’s rewards.While many may be fine with exploring for the sake of exploring, there will also be specific benefits for you, your allies, and maybe for everyone in general. Here are some of the things you could find and their possible rewards:

Rediscover old Gates: finding a Gate can be one of the most valuable discoveries, assuming that you are able to use it. Some will need to be repaired or otherwise reactivated. Once a Gate has been reactivated, you’ll be the first to go in and explore a new area of space, with all the possible resources, survivors, and dangers there for you to find! Perhaps even some of the old unique prototype ships or components hiding out in an abandoned research station.

Resource fields: Creating new ships, researching new technologies, maintaining your population. It all needs a constant and varied source of resources that HADES 9 can provide little to none of. So hunting for resources is a major priority, be it through salvaging, asteroid mining, scooping gas out of a cloud, or something else.

Convoys of civilian refugees: If the passengers are alive, you will have a nice addition to your labor pool, but even if not, you’ll at least have a source of salvage.

Lost technologies: Searching old stations, ships, and so on can sometimes yield relatively intact old techs. This can be anywhere from a complete ship, a specific component for your flagship, or simply a new blueprint that you can use for construction.

And much more. Of course, while you are boating around in order to find cool new technologies, artifacts, and helpless passenger liners, there will also be other players and NPC fleets roaming around to take advantage of the same things, who will not take kindly to you making off with them. So always be on your guard, nowhere is truly safe.

Designing the GalaxyAreas of interest are the locations in space that are connected via Gates, wormholes, and so forth. Gates were massively expensive to construct, but their ability facilitate rapid travel on a galactic scale means that they are still relatively common.

Each of the Gates in the network leads to many others, like a web structure, each with their own point of interest such as valuable resources, population centers, or constructions that were of great import, such as massive planet-wide mining operations that provided resources to many different colonies or enormous Dyson Spheres, titanic shipyards, or the construction of a new Matrioshka Brain. Of course, like mankind, most of these constructs are burning husks of their former glory.

Each area of space that contains an area of interest like this is massive. If you want to, you can fly for hours from the center of space in order to hunt for new things to discover. The further you get away from the center, the less there will be to find, but there can be things that are deliberately hidden (such as a secret research lab) or things that have been flung into the depths of space during the devastation.

Just to clarify: while we may not have a single seamless map, there will be a stupid amount of huge maps to explore, so you will not need to worry about interesting areas to visit. Through the web of Gates, you’ll be able to fly from one side of the galaxy to the other, which will take a insanely long time to do (Much longer than it did Novus), assuming you even survive, which is honestly a much more valid question... The fact that we are no longer have a single seamless map means that we can make each area of space much more detailed and interesting, with the single main focus for the area as well as smaller ones that are scattered around it.

That’s today’s blog! We hope you found it interesting. If you have any ideas for cool areas of interest that you think we should be working on, please let us know in the comments!

Our next update will be about the founder program or publisher options we have, the pro's and con's of each, and how we think we could handle it.

That’s pretty awesome, I look forward to the large amount of things to do in Hades. Novus seemed to have very little to do except research and fight. However, I’d be curious how research will compare in Hades. Will it still be seemingly infinite? Or will it be a set of stuff we can research?

The gate concept is interesting, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t miss procedurally generated content. Unfortunately, there just isn’t enough resources to make that work with a good amount of depth. The gates concept would be increasingly interesting if the map/galaxy procedurally changed requiring constant exploration.

As it stands I imagine exploration will come to an end at some point. Eventually the galaxy would reach a point that is just too large and further Gates/areas would be counterproductive.

Shadows wrote:As it stands I imagine exploration will come to an end at some point. Eventually the galaxy would reach a point that is just too large and further Gates/areas would be counterproductive.

This won't happen often as remember, the further you get away from hades 9 station the harder it is to continue, meaning exponentially More Preoperation is needed. So it's not the kind of content you can blaze threw.

Also we will be adding more maps over time. and are acualy already thinking about a dynamic way for gates to be failing or malfunctioning and with that we could make the map changing, I. E. It's not allways the same path to the same destination.

Research is a topic we will cover in another update soon originally we actually did touch on it here but there is to much to descuse it didn't really fit.

NameAceSNIPER wrote:Awesome update, I really enjoyed the teaser trailer I felt the writing for it was well done and did a great job of showing the darkness of the universe, looking forward to the next update even more.

Aetherblade wrote:but there can be things that are deliberately hidden (such as a secret research lab)

will locations of these change at random? Because once discovered they won't be secret much longer. If they are "one-time-loot" it's hard for me to think of a way to have "enough" of this kind of thing for a lot of players.

Sypheria wrote:They'll be at random locations and unique to the individual player.

Ah ok. I guess these are supposed to be super rare then? I assume 95% of points of interest in the universe will be common between players? So they fight over these resources (it'd be weird to try and keep others from getting the loot/try to kill them on arrival when they don't share that PoI location)

Lord Tyrius wrote:Ah ok. I guess these are supposed to be super rare then? I assume 95% of points of interest in the universe will be common between players? So they fight over these resources (it'd be weird to try and keep others from getting the loot/try to kill them on arrival when they don't share that PoI location)

100% of points of interest will be common, they are the "maps" that build up the universe, similar in function to how the EVE online universe is built.

the specific hidden "things" in these maps will be more dynamic and random, i.e. you may have a crewmember who if you talk to tells you about a weapons production station that was orbiting this planet, but is not here now maybe it was blasted away, and this will kinda spawn a mini-quest to find it for that player. the next player who goes there may not have any crewmembers who know anything about this area. This is still in the design phase so it is subject to change*

however in addition to that, most things of value will be more dynamic, for example, astiroid fields will spawn, and have finite resources, once they have been discovered and mined out they are gone and new ones will spawn elsewhere. this creates real value in information, as well as exploration. the location of an untouched high-value asteroid field would be near priceless to a large industrial Armada.